


the words that make an origin story

by wordybee



Series: Community Appreciation Week 2017 [1]
Category: Community (TV)
Genre: Character Study, Community Appreciation Week 2017, Gen, Pre-Series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-24
Updated: 2017-04-24
Packaged: 2018-10-23 12:41:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,740
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10719543
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wordybee/pseuds/wordybee
Summary: Community Appreciation Week 2017Day 1: favorite character (Troy Barnes)





	the words that make an origin story

**Author's Note:**

> special thanks to bethanyactually for beta-izing this even though 'beta-izing' isn't a word.
> 
> note: this fic completely ignores the continuity implosion that is "Heroic Origins" because, no.

Troy knows that he's not the smartest. It never really bothers him, because his teacher knows that he tries and she never yells at him. He’s only six years old, his mom says, and learning will come with time. Figuring out the difference between the little letter ‘b’ and the little letter ‘d’ just requires practice. Adding and subtracting the numbers his teacher gives him might take him a few moments longer than the rest of the kids, but she’s never said anything about the way he counts on his fingers. Practice, practice, practice – that’s all he needs. The schooling environment is harder for some children, the adults say to each other when they think he isn’t listening, but everything evens out in the end and Troy will be just fine with practice.

He doesn’t know how practice will solve his confusion over why cats and dogs can’t mix and make a really cute puppy-kitten for him to play with, or how Godzilla can’t be real when Godzilla shows up on the same exact television from which Troy’s dad gets his news, and news is completely real. But practice is the answer, somehow, and when Troy learns what it is he needs to practice, he’ll be just as smart as the other kids. It will be nice, he thinks, when he doesn’t have to feel so confused anymore. When his mom will stop having to tell him, in that sympathetically encouraging voice, that kindness is more important than being smart, and it’s not even that Troy _isn’t smart,_ but maybe he jumps to conclusions a bit too quickly and doesn’t spend enough time thinking things through. Kindness is important, though, and the rest will come with time.

Those words enter his mind and become a mantra, long before he ever figures out what a mantra even is. He repeats them to himself when he counts his fingers wrong and when he writes ‘bog’ instead of ‘dog’ and when he gets confused over why the Pledge of Allegiance makes him pledge to a Republic that’s invisible, with liberty and justice for all. For years, he repeats his mother’s words of comfort without realizing that he’s even doing it, until the idea of them becomes a truth as true as any he’s ever known.

* * *

 

Troy knows that children aren’t the cause of their parents’ divorce. There are a lot of television shows that use an episode or two to hammer that message home, to the point where he’s pretty sick of seeing it. Of course kids aren’t the cause of divorce. Parents practically live in alternate universes from their children, with things like electricity bills and nine-to-five jobs to deal with, so how could something as simple as having a kid lead them to break up? It’s far more likely that paying bills causes divorce, or getting the wrong kind of car, or something called Insurance Premiums that Troy doesn’t actually understand – but they do sound complicated.

Still, the fact that Troy’s name comes up often in their arguments makes him second-guess the things he learned from television.

“You’re too hard on Troy,” his mom says. They don’t know he’s listening to them in the living room from his chair at the kitchen table. If they knew he could hear them, his mom would have that sour, forced smile on her face and his dad would be stern, would probably pick up a newspaper to hide behind and refuse to say anything at all while Mom asked Troy about school and friends and the girls he liked.

“You’re too soft on him,” Troy’s dad snaps. “The boy has no common sense. He could’ve gotten hit by a car because he got distracted by a dog. He’s twelve years old and he doesn’t know that you look both ways before crossing the street?”

Oh, was that what they were fighting over? His parents hadn’t seemed too angry with him that morning, just disappointed and concerned. If anything, the angry person in that conversation had been the lady who had marched him to his front door and started lecturing his mom and dad about how she’d almost hit him with her car, and how Troy hadn’t even hesitated before running across the street, and how they should teach him better about road safety. Why weren’t they fighting with that lady, instead of with each other?

Anyway, Troy had seen the glimmer of pride in his mom’s eyes when he’d explained the dog stuck on the median, and how he’d just wanted to get it to safety.

_Kindness is more important._

Then Troy’s dad says, “This world is going to eat him alive.”

The words drive themselves deep, much like the mantra his mother had given him when he was six years old and always confused. Without realizing it, Troy secures these words somewhere in the depths of his mind and they begin cycling through his thoughts, over and over and over.

Six months later, when his mom is hugging him goodbye and holding a plane ticket to North Carolina, Troy’s heart is breaking and all he can do is cling to her. There’s something inside of him that believes if he just keeps hold of her, she’ll miss her flight and she’ll never have to leave. He knows that it’s ridiculous, that she will leave regardless, but he holds her and holds her and holds her until his father is prying his arms away and she’s stepping back to lift her suitcase off the pavement.

He watches her leave through the sliding glass doors of the Denver airport and, for what it’s worth, his dad slaps an almost comforting hand on his shoulder before pulling him away, back toward the car.

Troy’s father doesn’t say anything as he drives them back to the house. He doesn’t say anything as he gets out of the car. He doesn’t say anything as he pointedly opens Troy’s passenger-side door and gestures toward the house, and he doesn’t say anything as Troy unbuckles his seatbelt and climbs out of the vehicle as slowly as possible.

It’s only when Troy is glumly staring at the front door, standing in a city that no longer contains his mother and is therefore woefully bereft of things like hugs and sympathy and understanding, that Troy’s dad speaks.

“You need to toughen up, Troy. Or this world is going to eat you alive.”

* * *

 

Troy knows that high school is important because television says it is. He knows that he has to plan his next four years out carefully or they’ll be hell. He knows that this is what his father meant two years ago when he’d told him that the world could eat him alive.

He tries his best not to picture a fissure in the ground full of rocky teeth when he remembers the words, because that is exactly the sort of thing that would make Dad roll his eyes at Troy and hide, silent, behind a newspaper for several hours.

 _Toughen up, Troy. Think things through. Stop daydreaming._ They’re all his dad’s words, all things that have rooted themselves in Troy’s brain. Troy has always been dumb and thoughtless and confused, has always acted without processing and only realized afterwards why his actions had been wrong. He’s assumed things and believed things and arrived at conclusions that didn’t actually make sense, and really – that was no way to go through life, right? He tells himself that his father’s advice on strength is exactly what he needs, especially for high school.

When he sits down in his homeroom class on his first day, Troy decides that the best strategy for getting through school is the one his dad uses for getting through life: silence. Troy has no newspaper to hide behind, of course, but he can hide behind his smiles and a cultivated aloofness and an acceptance of his own dimness that the other kids in class learn to respect. He doesn’t get embarrassed when he gets things wrong – he gets comedic. He gets stubborn. He efficiently carves out a space in his high school as someone who is well-liked and popular and strong, and his dad’s words are what propel him and bolster him.

But one morning early on, as he’s heading into his freshman Algebra class, he hears the loud bang of an oversized textbook falling and the brash echo of teenage laughter and looks to see a gawky fellow classmate struggling to pick up her book without sending everything else in her arms toppling to the shiny tile floor. Troy thinks nothing of bending down to pick up the book, just smiles pleasantly as he hands it back to a chubby girl with crooked teeth and frizzy brown hair. Because several years ago, his mother had said something too, and her words stick inside his head – less prominent, perhaps – just has his father’s words do:

_Kindness is more important._

* * *

 

Troy knows that students like him, who aren’t good with books and grades but are pretty good at memorizing sports moves and throwing things, belong on teams. It’s the safest place to be. If you’re really good, sports teams can get you extra help from teachers and private tutors, and – if you’re really, really good – safety from failing grades. They can also get you into college after high school, which can get you a good job and a good life when school is over.

He joins the football team. His dad is proud of him, but when he calls his mom in North Carolina for their weekly chat, she’s concerned until he explains the stuff about college to her. She knows just as well as he does that Troy’s grades have never been (and probably will never be) good enough to get him into a good university, and he has no skills that look particularly impressive on a resume. For the sake of her boy’s future, she tells him to try his best and to still go to church, and he doesn’t inform her that church isn’t really something his dad does anymore and, by extension, neither does Troy.

For the first time in a long time, Troy’s dad looks at him with more than vague concern over his dim, good-natured son’s future. He looks at Troy with pride, and Troy accepts that pride readily, because he deserves it. Because Troy is good at football. Being good at something, Troy finds out, is a great way to learn who you are, and Troy becomes Troy Barnes, Star Quarterback for Riverside High. It gets easier and easier for him to slide into the role of strength and popularity that stems from his father’s advice, easier and easier for him to let the words his mother had spoken fade into the back of his mind, mostly forgotten.

He passes through high school breezily, learns the school’s fight songs and earns glory and a letterman jacket and promises of a bright, gilded future. He laughs off his middling-to-poor grades because they don’t matter, and the people who get good grades are just nerds. Who cares? Troy Barnes, Star Quarterback for Riverside High, is going to be famous one day. He’s going to be rich and famous and strong, and it won’t make a difference that he isn’t so smart.

Troy ignores the suffocating feeling that grips him whenever his coach shows him off to talent scouts and brags about the trophies Troy has won for the school and how he’s going down in history as one of the best players in the game someday. He ignores the familiar vision of an earthy maw with sharp, rocky teeth chomping at Troy’s feet, because it’s a ridiculous idea and the world can’t devour someone as great as Troy Barnes.

* * *

 

Troy knows that his mom will be livid when she finds out he’d gotten hurt doing a keg flip, and he knows that she’ll consider the loss of his scholarship a justified punishment from God for drinking alcohol. He also knows that she can never, ever find out that he injured himself on purpose – that the thought of spending four more years crammed into the identity of the stupid, shallow jock he had created as a freshman made him either want to run and join the circus or injure himself to make the possibility impossible. In the end, he was drunk and feeling no pain and the opportunity was there for the taking. And also, he didn’t really agree with the circus’s treatment of animals.

His father is livid as well, but Dad’s anger has always been easier to deal with than Mom’s, because his anger is just more silence. Troy is used to the quiet. It sucks that he can’t really expect his father to help him get around the house, though, and he wishes his injury hadn’t been so incredibly successful. One shoulder dislocation would have been enough; two is overkill. But Troy thinks he probably deserves the inconvenience of having to feed himself with both arms in slings.

He’s sitting up late at night, surrounded by the mess one creates when one has to tear into a bag of Cheez-its with one’s teeth and a precariously-angled desk drawer, when he sees the commercial for a local community college. The school seems pretty laid back, Troy figures, and like the sort of place he could use to avoid his dad for a few hours. Also, the nerdy basketball dude’s cool thumbs-up move makes him laugh, and then wince when he tries to do it with one of his injured arms.

* * *

 

Troy doesn’t know what he’s doing as he signs the admissions papers for Greendale Community College. He doesn’t know what he wants to study, or if he wants to study anything at all, so when the advisor asks him questions he just smiles and shrugs his freshly-healed shoulders and lets the lady sign him up for some basic classes. She tells him that he doesn’t need any remedial courses, which Troy is weirdly proud about, even when she ends the pronouncement by adding, just barely.  His mother’s words, the mantra that he’d buried under football and popularity and strength, resurface again – _kindness is more important_  – and just keeps smiling through his embarrassment.

It’s strange. Those words hadn’t entered his mind in years, as the daunting high-school environment made his father’s harsher advice seem more practical. But Troy doesn’t think the same words that got him through high school will work at Greendale. He’s not even sure they worked back in high school. Maybe his mother’s words will be more useful, or maybe Troy will find some different words to live by, some mantra that is unique to himself and his life from this point onward.

Troy doesn’t know if he’ll make new friends or if he’ll drop out during his first semester. He doesn’t know if his dad will let him stick around, or if he’ll have to get a job and an apartment and live on his own because the silence is too much and home doesn’t feel like home anymore. Troy doesn’t know what he wants to do with his life and he doesn’t know if he’ll need to be kind or if he’ll need to be strong, but he thinks it’ll probably have to be a mix of the two. He doesn’t know if he’ll be popular, if he’ll get a girlfriend, if he’ll have fun or get so bored that washing dishes at Denny’s will look like heaven compared to another four or so years of academia. Troy doesn’t know if he’s smart enough for college, even a community college with standards so low that the application reads _You’re Already Accepted!_ at the bottom in Comic Sans font.

But there is a uniqueness to this place, he has to admit. Troy thinks that just maybe this is where he needs to be to find that new mantra and that new path in life, one where he can be a kind of smart instead of kind instead of smart. One where he could be strong even though he daydreams too much. He decides that it’s all right for him to just go with it for once, to stop worrying and stop pretending and stop thinking about how things are _supposed_ to be, because he really doesn’t know.  
  
For the first time in a long time, Troy finds peace in not knowing.


End file.
